"Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops, like bishops, and your religious act like religious." - Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, 1972

3 comments:

On the bare-bones budget, I heard on the press conference that part of the funding will go to the three seminarians who will be attending classes off island. There was No mention of who will be funding the classes of the seminarians and the salaries of the teachers at RMS. BTW, is the monk off the Archdiocesan payroll?

The abuse catastrophe caused the same financial problems where I live in the US.

People were so infuriated by abuse-enabling bishops that they stopped donating to annual diocesan appeals and Peter's Pence collections.

Catholic grammar school tuition went through the roof. Even those in poor Hispanic neighborhoods cost $600.00 per month, plus uniforms, etc. None of those schools are worth it and their enrollment continues to plummet.

All of the Black Catholic schools and all but two Black Catholic churches failed and closed. Racist bishops gave them literally no support. One beautiful old church with crumbling ceilings dropped to only 25 elderly parishoners. Its near-empty grade school was also closed before the entire parish was shut down.

One flourishing Black church had over $1 million in the bank, but the bishop confiscated that to pay for abuse attorneys before he closed the venerable old church and school and assigned parishioners to a distant ghetto mission.

Understandably, that caused a huge amount of ongoing ill will. Many people refused to attend the other church because it is culturally incompatible with them and pastored by a credibly accused pedophile who escaped punishment.

Only all-White regional Catholic high schools are solvent. Tuition for those runs $30,000 to $51,000+ per year. Most of them are wealthy private schools owned by religious orders, not the diocese. A few of them were sued blind because of abusive faculty members, but they're so rich that they soon recovered.

In general, the local Catholic schools aren't worth a damn regardless of their high cost. Secular private schools and three special public high schools here are infinitely better.